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February 13. Damn you so much, consumerism.

There are still moments that we can have revelations. Seldom do they occur but all the more meaningful is the trace they leave behind in our minds. It is so powerful because of it makes us feel related to the very essence of being more than anything else, albeit in a negative way. The kind of revelations I so vaguely refer to here are the hypercriticisms of modern life, stating that at its very core is falsehood. These hypercriticisms allow us to demonize the entire social structure that embeds us from the perspective of a u-topia that is created in the process.

Thus reads the auto-critique of my heart-felt critique of consumerism. O, how much I detest this monster, this…but what is it? Consumption as the new religion, the faith that the act of consuming gives us something? No. There is no need for faith, or any other big stories. Consumerism means instant satisfaction, reduction of the arc to length zero, and can only carry total dullness in its wake.

And yet, a highly abstract critique like the one we are “in” here, cannot adequatly describe the symptoms, it can only detect inconsistencies in their common interpretation. For me, consumerism means passiveness, the opposite of creativity, the opposite of schöpferische Tätigkeit (death). But matters are too complicated: the consumer doesn’t exist, it is only a statistical mean, a set of numbers that never buy anything. At our very best, we can diagnostize the culture of consumerism and say we dislike it and why. And our intellectual conclusion, Adorned with the ashes of our bustling ideas will be: “and precisely in its ultimate fulfillment as individuals is it that they will cease to exist as individuals; their critical potential will be defused by their very state of being.”